Depending on your generation, Reliable Essays: the Best of Clive James either introduces or re-introduces a seriously entertaining literary talent. Collections of James' essays seem to appear perennially, but in the days before he swapped the TLS for TV, James wrote regular book reviews, a clutch of which are reproduced here. His appraisal of George Orwell, that peerless appraiser of other writers, is worthy of its subject, and the four pieces, in reverse chronology, celebrating Philip Larkin, re-affirm the singular English beauty of his poetry, and the considerable assets of his two novels, Jill and A Girl in Winter. James omits his later review of the Andrew Motion biography, Philip Larkin, which perhaps would have finished, or rather begun, the sequence, but the four pieces stand on their own. One enduring theme in his writing is to judge the artist rather than the man or woman, exemplified in his predilection for writers such as Kingsley Amis and Evelyn Waugh, and the entangled personae of the dauntingly talented--and equally learned--Barry Humphries. Though he mugs Malcolm Muggeridge, and enjoyably mocks the Sherlockologists, his jibes, though never cheap, are always of good value.

James is a polymath, yet as Julian Barnes points out in his pithy, affectionate introduction, perhaps the poetry, novels, television columns, television presenting, documentary-making and all-round celebrity detract from what is a considerable intellectual gift. James defends his more populist activities, yet this one-man "brilliant bunch of guys", as the New Yorker put it, shows with extended pieces on Primo Levi's The Drowned and the Saved, and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners that he can punch his weight with the best of them, displaying erudition, compassion, depth of reading, and a commitment to language both vigilant and generous. With a new postscript following each piece, the tonal unity remains remarkable, considering the 30-year span of cultural inquiry that shows little sign of abating. Even As We Speak, another recent collection, covers the final decade of the 20th century, and includes his notorious requiem for the late Princess of Wales (it doesn't make the cut here, curiously), but Reliable Essays perhaps best captures his extraordinary breadth of vision, and intellectual agility. Television's loss will be literature's regain.--David Vincent

2008-05-26 Caring Criticism

It isn't the fact that he's funny; it isn't the fact that he's clever; it isn't even the fact that he is fair: it is the fact that he cares.

It is hard not to warm to a man who admits he was expecting to be punched by Norman Mailer as a result of his scalpel-fine dissection of Mailer's biography of Marilyn Monroe. When James' builds to his minor climax, it is with the passing comment that Monroe, good as she was at portraying the ditzy blonde (in 'Some Like It Hot') was so, for a reason. It was because she was good ..."at being inarticulately abstracted for the same reason that midgets are good at being short". This comes like the stroke of a samurai-sword passing through the neck silently and frictionlessly. Having been introduced to just some of the hubris of Mailer's house of cards, with this comment we are permitted, slowly, to see the head roll off the shoulders...

On Orwell similarly the reviewer who criticises the style misses the point. James has a very specific aim in repeating himself ad nauseum (KGB, NKVD, MVD etc because they are what we know not because they are what he knows); James is using the repetition to drive home the huge significance of the word "Orwellian." It is a point well made and it is a point well made by a man who knows that this repetition can only bring home to us, at the same time, why there will never be any such word as 'Jamesian'...

Not that he lacks confidence. At one point, his quaternity of professional Australians in Britain includes Germaine Greer and Barry Humphries and also himself, but Rolf Harris gets only a passing reference and John Pilger not even that. Yet it is Pilger who has been Journalist of the Year - twice. And for some of us, it was Pilger's reporting on the effect of sanctions in Iraq for the Guardian which was the start of us suspecting that something was genuinely wrong right at the heart of Westminster. And then Rolf Harris is easily made fun of, as he himself knows, but of them all it is Rolf that has touched the nation over the course of years, as officially Australian. James' is keen to tell us of his private audience with the Queen mother, but when the venerable Rolf painted the even more venerable Queen herself, it was a moment which you *could* see, as when the nation touched Rolf back. If you cared to.

That said, one acknowledges the failings the early reviewer pointed out on factual grounds. James has these failings and more. He is good at spotting the good writing but he does then like to tell us exactly why it is good. A little of this goes a very long way. These failings do raise questions about how much someone cares. But not big questions. The piece on Barry Humphries could be riddled with inaccuracies. It does not matter because it is not his judgement James is pronouncing, it is his loyalty. James and his subjects are not adversaries, they are ships passing in the night. It is James and his feelings which these essays are marrying, with the judicious combination of warm humour and cold-eyed honesty which makes jokes about midgets funny - to midgets, too!

He marries his memories elsewhere and, to me, with less effect.

If a question does arise, I would ask who these essays are really for? Perhaps the question only arises in book form. Perhaps in original published journal form they are simply for the editor; the paymaster, and carry the weight of their time. Slowed to a halt in book form one wonders who will care what James says about Muggeridge now that the dust has settled and history has made its judgement. James is still proud of his fairness (when he wrote about Muggeridge he was 'worth the money') and he is proud of his adventurousness (in Rome) whereas in book form these are easily the weakest pieces. James would do better to think these essays are for James' himself.

But the earlier reviewer was right about the title: a more careless choice you could not look for.